Graduate Student, Sociology and Philosophy of Mind
School of Social and Political Sciences
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Steve Kemp
Kate Orton-johnson Dave Ward |
About
In the second year of a PhD at Edinburgh, my thesis is concerned with the multiple ways we have always been cyborgic. Rather than seeing the information revolution as fundamentally changing human selves and human brains, I'm tracing out the ways in which humans have always engaged with technology in ways which co-produce a sense of 'humanness', and, the illusion of a unitary internal self.
Through picking apart the apparent boundary between 'us' and our 'tools', I'm looking at emergence of self and co-production both in producing identity and maintaining/further co-producing wider social systems and institutions. I argue that since selves are co-produced through our technologies, the information revolution, and the technologies which surround it through webs of power, control and resistance.
At present, I'm focusing on the politics and inherent embodiment of code and protocol.
My interests span from Neuroscience, Cognition and Philosophy of Mind to Cyborgs, Self-organisation, Abjection and Monstrosity, and includes the work of Dan Lloyd, Shaun Gallagher, Alexander Galloway, Adrian MacKenzie, Dennet, Elizabeth Grosz, Andy Clark, John Protevi, Del LaGrace Volcano, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Guillaume. Somewhere in there is a thesis waiting to happen...
Further along the thesis path, I'll be tackling the question of whether the Socially Extended Mind Hypothesis, and the network politics of protocol can offer a better explanatory framework for a fluid understanding of gender identity than more traditional mind philosophies which view the brain, mind, body and environment as linked and symbiotic but inherently separate. My research itself aims to explore how an in-depth examination of the Socially Extended Mind Hypothesis from an explicitly sociological perspective will provide a critical understanding of how the process of gendering is involved in creating us as cognitive human subjects in the 21st Century.
